Ventura County Gears Up for Big Bike Race as Riders Near Finish

A dedicated cyclist, Jim Loree will be at the top of steep Balcom Canyon with cowbells and a camera today as 109 world-class bike racers pedal across Ventura County in the last stages of the 600-mile Tour of California.

“I’ve traveled to France to see the Tour de France,” said Loree, 65, a Ventura retiree who rides 200 miles a week. “A number of the top professionals in the world are coming right through Ventura County. I’m pumped.”

For others, though, the prospect of dozens of elite bike racers whizzing through their streets, possibly delaying their travels, stirred worries about crowds and traffic.

Today’s 3 1/2 -hour race will pass through four county cities.

“It’s a cool idea,” said Steve Fields, whose Upper Ojai home is a stone’s throw from the race course. “But my big thing is we have to get to the gym and back before the road closes.”

Organizers are hoping the eight-day Tour de France-style race, which started a week ago in San Francisco, will catch on with Californians as it wends it way down the state.

Today’s 90-mile-long leg is the final of six road stages that have led riders over craggy mountains, across oak-studded valleys and past the shimmering Pacific Ocean. The competition concludes Sunday in Redondo Beach with a 76.5-mile circuit race -- 10 laps around city streets.

In its inaugural year, the tour has been immensely popular in the communities it has passed through, drawing an estimated 700,000 spectators.

Many Ventura County residents seemed unaware of the race or not particularly interested in getting an up-close look at the pack rushing by, said business officials in Thousand Oaks, Ojai and Santa Paula.

“We don’t have any special events planned,” said Tish Cabezas, spokeswoman for The Oaks mall in Thousand Oaks, where racers will pass in the early afternoon. “We’re mainly trying to just reroute the people who are going to come to shop.”

In Ojai, shop and cafe owners have complained that they were not given enough notice of the race to plan promotional events, said Heidi Mellein, executive assistant at the Chamber of Commerce.

Mellein said the chamber was not given information about the tour’s route, which will take racers through the center of Ojai, or other details about the race until a week ago.

“I’ve had people calling me all week asking when it was coming through town and where the best spot to watch would be,” Mellein said. “I had to dig to find that information.”

A race organizer said there has been extensive publicity about the tour in the weeks leading up to it. Still, because it is so new, many people don’t understand what will happen until the race actually hits their community, said Bob Colarossi, managing director of AEG, a tour sponsor.

Organizers will meet within 30 days of the race’s finish to go over every detail and see what they can do better next year, Colarossi said. Forming partnerships with local businesses is one possibility, he said.

“Our goals for this year were to make it a good experience for the athletes, the communities and the sponsors,” he said. “Going forward, we will continue to widen that circle a bit.”

Signs warning of road closures have been up in the affected communities for two weeks, said Steve Reid, a spokesman for the California Highway Patrol. The CHP will try to keep road closures to a minimum, closing roads about 20 minutes before the pack arrives and reopening them as soon as it passes, Reid said.

Still, motorists may experience delays of up to an hour and are advised to seek alternate routes, he said.

Racers will depart Santa Barbara at 10 a.m. today, entering Ventura County on California 150, Reid said. The route will take them down the center of Ojai about 11 a.m., past eastern Santa Paula at 11:45 a.m. and through residential Camarillo about 12:15 p.m.

The leader is expected to cross the finish line at the Thousand Oaks headquarters of Amgen, the tour’s sponsor, around 1:20 p.m. Cheering crowds are expected to gather there to welcome the stage winners.

Loree, the racing enthusiast, said he picked Balcom Canyon to view the competition because it is the fourth and final mountain climb the racers will make today.

“It’s a short and very steep climb,” Loree said. “It’s a great place to see the struggle.”

Ken Brookes, manager of the Santa Paula Chamber of Commerce, said his organization was not planning any events. The Santa Paula portion of the race is a sprint, “so they will be going by real fast,” Brookes said.

But bicycle groups in town are planning to watch the racers go by, and Brookes said he would too. Any inconvenience caused by road closures is minor, he said.

“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime deal,” he said. “It may never come again.”